Name: Salad of Celery, Cabbage, and Beets
Ingredients: equal quantities of celery; equal quantities of cold slaw; pickled beets, finely chopped; Remoulade Sauce or Sydney Smith's Salad Dressing

Why it works: Celery and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,360 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Salad of Celery, Cabbage, and Beets

Ingredients

equal quantities of celery
equal quantities of cold slaw
pickled beets, finely chopped
Remoulade Sauce or Sydney Smith's Salad Dressing

Directions

Make the salad

Combine equal amounts of celery and cold slaw with finely chopped pickled beets.
Mix well and refrigerate in the ice box.
Add Remoulade Sauce or Sydney Smith's Salad Dressing and mix thoroughly.

Serve

Let the salad stand for no more than 10 minutes before serving.
Serve very cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Celery + saucetop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,360 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Celery: Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild crunch to the salad.
Cold slaw: Provides the bulk of the salad and a crisp, shredded texture.
Pickled beets: Adds tangy acidity and a sweet, earthy flavour along with colour.
Remoulade sauce or sydney smith's salad dressing: Adds creamy fat and moisture that binds the vegetables together.

The step that matters

Let the salad stand no more than 10 minutes. Dressing a crisp salad and leaving it too long draws out moisture from the vegetables, making it soggy and diluting the dressing. Keeping the standing time short preserves crunch and flavour.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

Chicken Salad623 recipes

Salad Dressing491 recipes

Tomato Salad179 recipes

Cold Slaw160 recipes

Like knowing why a recipe works?

The free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.

Salad of Celery, Cabbage, and Beets